Heritage

The Italianità: Italian Diaspora Artists Examine Identity exhibition will be opening Sunday May 5th at the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles (IAMLA). The exhibit will focus on the Italian diaspora, which is the dispersion of people to a new …

Domenico Di Salvo arrived on Ellis Island on September 5, 1907. He had left on the 23 rd of August on the Koenig Albert steamer, which had  been used only for a few years on the profitable Genoa-Naples-New York route. …

As usual, Cicero is illuminating: “a life without music is like a body without its soul.”  There’s an undeniable truth in his words the people of his motherland, glorious Rome, always kept in mind. Indeed, the Romans loved music and …

The Easter celebrations of Sicily are as numerous as petals on daisy chains, with an endless procession of Holy Week festivities to choose from. Every small town has its Via Crucis which reenacts the final moments of Jesus Christ’s life …

Crossroads and street corners have long been the haunt of peddlers, pickpockets and prostitutes. And as far back as ancient Roman times images of deities have been hung there to protect passers by from evil. Today over 500 statues and …

Even though present-day hospitals all around the world are basically centers providing medical assistance and rehabilitation of the sick, the forerunners to these institutions were originally conceived in a broader sense as “places of hospitality:” hence the similarity between the …

The craft of rope makers, funaio or cordaro, is as old as Man: a thousands-year long art, based on an easy manual technique, where two only apparently simple factors join forces: the rush (which in Italian is called giunco and …

Art, in all its forms and shapes, is the most immediate and beautiful of all ways of communicating: a painting, a song, a piece of poetry, a palace or a church, they all tell a story. A story of emotions …

Italian celebrations for International Women’s Day are, usually, rather cliché: journalists and TV hosts become experts of women history and sociology, bringing out their customary speeches for the occasion, only to forget it all the following day, when they focus …

The expression Made in Italy itself is almost perfectly synonymous with Italian craftsmanship, or artigianato, to say it as we do. From culinary products to clothing, from jewelry to leather goods and fabrics, the importance of human hands and of …